[Bf-committers] Visibility of attribution

[Alex Fraser]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Stephen Swaney" <sswaney at centurytel.net>
> I do not remember the exact circumstances, but we had a situation
> before where some corporation wanted an attribution notice put in the
> UI before they would contribute code. The answer was no.

Do you remember what the objection was? Note that we aren't asking to be attributed more prominently than other contributors; just on the same page. Nor are we asking for a logo to be displayed on the web site. I think attribution in a place that users can see is a fair trade for code contribution. Attribution in the release notes is good (thanks Tom, I didn't know about that page), but that means you become invisible in the next release.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Campbell Barton" <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
> re 1) The contributors are free to add in their own attribution in the
> patch, perhaps it would help to formalize this, though the few times
> I've had to deal with this a line in the header assigning copyright
> was ok.
> So don't mind either way.

I think it would be good to formalise this, particularly to include the date that the contributions were made.

> > Personally, I am not sure of the value of asserting copyright over
> > code that is GPL'ed.
> 
> In practice probably not much though it does mean if we want to add
> some GPL exception like we did for the BGE or one day move to GPLv3,
> copyright holders need to agree,

Yes, one thing attribution does is make it easier to track who owns what. And it really is an incentive to contribute.

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
Alex Fraser
Software Engineer
The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing